The PRC also claims Taiwan — which is controlled by the Republic of China (ROC), a separate political entity—as its 23rd province, a claim controversial due to the complex political status of Taiwan and the unresolved Chinese Civil War. The PRC government denies the legitimacy of the ROC.

China's landscape is vast and diverse, with forest steppes and the Gobi and Taklamakan deserts occupying the arid north and northwest near Mongolia and Central Asia, and subtropical forests being prevalent in the wetter south near Southeast Asia. The terrain of western China is rugged and elevated, with the Himalaya Karakoram, Pamir and Tian Shan mountain ranges separating China from South and Central Asia. The Yangtze and Yellow Rivers, the third- and sixth-longest in the world, have their sources in the Tibetan Plateau and continue to the densely populated eastern seaboard. China's coastline along the Pacific Ocean is 14,500 kilometres long—the 11th-longest in the world—and is bounded by the Bohai, Yellow, East and South China Seas.
The nation of China has had numerous historical incarnations. The ancient Chinese civil zation—one of the world's earliest—flourished in the fertile basin of the Yellow River in the North China Plain. China's political system was based on hereditary monarchies, known as dynasties, beginning with the semi-mythological Xia of the Yellow River basin (approx. 2000 BC) and ending with the fall of the Qing Dynasty in 1911. Since 221 BC, when the Qin Dynasty first conquered several states to form a Chinese empire, the country has expanded, fractured and been reformed numerous times. The Republic of China, founded in 1911 after the overthrow of the Qing dynasty, ruled the Chinese mainland until 1949. In 1945, the ROC acquired Taiwan from Japan following World War II.

In the 1946–1949 phase of the Chinese Civil War, the Chinese Communist Party defeated the nationalist Kuomintang in mainland China and established the People s Republic of China in Beijing on 1 October 1949. The Kuomintang relocated the ROC government to Taiwan establishing its capital in Taipei. The ROC's jurisdiction is now limited to Taiwan and several outlying islands, including Penghu, Kinmen and Matsu. Since 1949, the People s Republic of China and the Republic of China (now widely known as "Taiwan ) have remained in dispute over the sovereignty of China and the political status of Taiwan mutually claiming each other's territory and competing for international diplomatic recognition. In 1971, the PRC gained admission to the United Nations and took the Chinese seat as a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council. China is also a member of numerous formal and informal multilateral organizations, including the WTO, APEC, BRICS, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, the BCIM and the G-20. As of August 2012, all but 23 countries have recognized the PRC as the sole legitimate government of China.
Since the introduction of economic reforms in 1978, China has become the world's fastest-growing major economy

As of 2012, it is the world's second-largest economy after the United States, by both nominal GDP and purchasing power parity (PPP), and is also the world's largest export r and second-largest importer of goods. On a per capita income basis, China ranked 90th by nominal GDP and 91st by GDP (PPP) in 2011, according to the IMF. China is a recognized nuclear weapons state and has the world's largest standing army, with the second-largest defense budget In 2003, China became the third nation in the world, after the former Soviet Union and the United States, to independently launch a successful manned space mission China has been characterized as a potential superpower by a number of academics, military analysts, and public policy and economics analysts.